Wednesday, November 7, 2012

I've written about my poorly decorated room in the past. I also wrote last time about how there was a wizard theme in my room during multiple periods in one day. On advice from many of you and from teachers at school I decided to run with the wizard idea. I made up some wizard themed posters. But I wasn't looking for normal sized posters. I wanted to go all out. So here's what I did.

I found images from various wizard themed books/movies. Then I used some imagine editing software (I used Gimp) to add a motivational quote from the book/movie to each poster. The posters looked good on the screen but I knew that a single sheet of paper wasn't going to be big enough. Time to find some software to upsize my posters. I looked at Rasterbator (insert your own crude joke here), but it didn't look straight forward on a Mac. I also found Block Poster which is nice because it's done online so there's no need for an installation. I wasn't sure I wanted my images uploaded to a server and my Internet connection isn't terribly fast so I kept looking. Eventually I came across PosteRazor. It's an open source, cross platform application that is easy to use and fit the bill. I made my posters, printed them, put them together and hung them up.

The most challenging part of this whole process for me was the cutting and glueing. I not an arts and craft person. When someone says cutting and pasting I'm more likely to think of Ctrl-x and Ctrl-v than scissors and glue. Since it took a while to do the cutting and pasting, the posters went up over a span of weeks. My students seemed to enjoy them going up little by litte and looked forward to seeing what the next poster might be. Some are even asking for more posters. The entire process was straight forward and now my room looks a little better with images that are about 1 metre by 1 metre. The posters might even make a good math questions for my grade nines when we get to the geometry section of the course.

Here are the quotes I used. Can you guess the book or movie?

1. "This is a serious journey, not a hobbit walking party." -Not overly motivational, but it was fitting
2. "Do or do not, there is not try."
3. ""It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."
4. "I am looking for someone to share in an adventure I am planning...All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you."